Against all expectations, home-grown film-making and cinema-going are a
picture of good health

For some years now we’ve been hearing predictions about the imminent demise of cinema as we know it. Competing attractions and advances in technology have sounded the death knell for a medium that has been with us for more than 80 years, ever since the first “talking pictures” were unveiled.

Who needs to see a film on the big screen, the argument goes, when high-definition TVs, some of them so massive they wouldn’t look out of place in a smaller screening room of a multiplex, can be installed in our living rooms? And why would people – younger people, especially – bother to visit cinemas at all when they can access films on their laptops or smartphones? As for today’s teenagers, haven’t they forsaken movies altogether in favour of video games?

There is logic in all these arguments, until you consider that this past year has been a glorious one for cinema – and for British cinema in particular. Just look at the extraordinary success of Skyfall, by some distance the most popular James Bond film ever made. It has grossed in excess of £100 million in Britain, and more than $1 billion worldwide. This week it received five Oscar nominations, admittedly in minor categories.

Another British movie, Les Misérables, is a best picture nominee, and showcases the talents of up-and-coming Manx star Samantha Barks. Its London-based production company, Working Title, rounded off a great year with eight Oscar nods for Les Mis and four more for its ambitious Tolstoy adaptation, Anna Karenina. A glance at the behind-the-camera categories for the Oscar and Bafta shortlists confirms that we have some of the film world’s finest technicians and craftsmen.

But there’s more to it than that. The British film industry has finally woken up to the fact that cinema is something worth fighting for – and on our own terms. For too long our multiplexes have obediently screened whatever Hollywood has had to offer. And that has usually meant big budget “event” movies that target a core 14-25 demographic: superhero adventures and relentless visual spectaculars with no narrative logic but plenty of explosions. Many are thinly disguised alternatives to video games, for that apped-up core audience, so the studios commission a sequel. Then another. And another.

Not surprisingly, the preponderance of such movies, especially in the summer months, has been driving older audiences away from cinemas. But then along skipped The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a lightweight, charming account of British pensioners seeking a new, late-life start in India. A doughty cast of acting veterans – Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith – enhanced its appeal. Younger critics sniffed, and even Deborah Moggach, author of the film’s source novel, could not bring herself to praise its script. But the film was the surprise hit of last year.

Now other British films with a strong appeal to older audiences are following in its wake. Quartet, with another veteran cast (Maggie Smith again, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly) playing retired opera singers, opened strongly on New Year’s Day and will be in British cinemas for weeks to come. Next month heralds the arrival of another – Song for Marion, with Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp as an OAP couple.

The drive to make more films with grey appeal began with the phenomenal success of The King’s Speech a couple of years back. It attracted a broad range of ages, but the size of the film’s UK gross (£45 million) owed much to its ability to lure older people who rarely went to the cinema. It also proved that you didn’t need films featuring only older characters to capture the grey pound. In the coming weeks Les Misérables is expected to repeat the same trick.

Some British cinemas, addressing this trend, have now started to attract older audiences with special mid-week “silver screenings” at reduced prices, while others have been converted into luxury venues. They offer big, wide, comfortable seats, with tables beside them, enabling you to enjoy a glass of wine, a latte or even freshly prepared light snacks, served up just before a film begins. The prices may be steep, but upscale audiences, who had found the multiplex experience akin to sitting in a bleak warehouse, seem willing to pay.

Even without the luxury add-ons, smaller cinemas showing thoughtful, appealing independent films have had a good 12 months. In some British towns, disused cinemas are being renovated, reopened and are squarely marketing their films at their local community. The Regal in Melton Mowbray and the Ritz in Lincoln are two venues scheduled to reopen this year. Many small and gloriously old-fashioned picture houses dotted across the country are also going strong – in some cases, more than a century after they were first built. The beautiful Keswick Alhambra in the Lake District celebrates its centenary this year, while the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge has recently taken its picture house over from the council, with plans to digitise the projection system and preserve it for future generations. Community cinema operations such as Moviola, which shows films at more than 80 village halls in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire, and Screen Machine, an 80-seat mobile cinema that tours the Highlands and Western Islands, are going from strength to strength.

The rise of Picturehouse, Britain’s biggest independent cinema chain, has also been notable. It now has 21 venues across the country, including the Ritzy cinema in south London and the Phoenix in Oxford, and targets intelligent audiences who want more from a film than a superhero sequel can provide. Even though it has just been bought by multiplex giant Cineworld, Picturehouse has no plans to change its formula and is set to open 10 more arthouse cinemas in 2014.

More adventurous young film-goers are being well served, too, by an ambitious outfit called Secret Cinema, which requires audiences to pay upfront to see unnamed films in undisclosed venues. It may be a railway yard, a warehouse (which became a spaceship for a screening of Prometheus), or most recently a disused London school, temporarily converted to a prison to screen the jail drama The Shawshank Redemption. It’s an intriguing way to add zest and unpredictability to the film-going experience.

A quick scan of the coming year’s schedules confirms that there will be plenty of British films to keep the public coming back. They include About Time, a new Richard Curtis-written romantic comedy with a time-travel plot starring Bill Nighy, Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams, and Le Weekend, with Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as a middle-aged couple who try to spice up their marriage by revisiting the location of their honeymoon, Montmartre. And Saving Mr Banks is about the big-screen adaptation of Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson as P L Travers, the author of that very British story, locking horns with Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.

All of this suggests that, against the odds, gloomy obituaries for cinema are distinctly premature.